Not a RedFox Issue 1470 - NF Bitrate issue in 1 episode

[zanetti]

I understand you being upset....give it a few days and the 1080p may appear....it does happen.

Just for your info...here's the BluRay file sizes for the above episodes...

View attachment 68479

naaah, i already sourced the episode in question by other means and im fine, just was wondering wth is going on since, as mentioned, i have never experienced this before. lol.
and as for fluctuations, yeah. NF sucks. pulled two seasons of boston legal off of AP US, and every single episode falls between 300mb +/-. oh, well... cheers!

 

[Jimc115]

Glad to here that!

 

[cartman0208]

I try to have all the series to be 10MB per minute runtime up to 1GB per hour.
For 720p that is sufficient for my needs.
If the AS download does not match that, it's reencoding time.

 

[zanetti]

I try to have all the series to be 10MB per minute runtime up to 1GB per hour.
For 720p that is sufficient for my needs.
If the AS download does not match that, it's reencoding time.

noice.

a question.what do you do with banding issues? i just watched s01e01 of wednesday. i grabbed it in 1080p, AVC of course, and then reencoded it to x265. i noticed banding issues which inevitably leads to blockiness in one of the scenes in second half of the episode (part where thing gives orders to the barista boy in his room). i fired up shield opened NF app and ffwded to the exact same scene and although sliiiiiightly same issue, it is not as noticable. far from it. i then fired up AS and grabbed the same episode, 1080p and... theres a lot more of banding and blockiness then when i watch directly on shield in NF app. i checked the log and AS did get the highest bitrate stream. i thought i set the bitrate too low when reencoding to x265, which i did, but nevertheless theres almost no banding in NF app on shield, a lot more in MP4 i get from AS and definitely even more in my crappy reencode. so, im aware you cant make up pixels and such, if theres banding in MP4 from AS, it is there. but can you give me some advice for future reencodings how to deal with banding? im sure i can eleviate some by bumping up the bitrate, but since my goal is to have smaller file sizes, that kinda defeats the purpose. not to hijack the thread, if you could point me in the right direction etc. GOP? B frames? QP? depth? colorrange? any advice is more than welcome. cheers!

EDIT: just checked it in webbrowser on pc, NF website. a lot more banding than in NF app on shield, like a ton more. so, to summarize: almost zero banding in NF app on shield, a lot of banding in MP4 from AS and streaming in webbrowser. i am confused. what gives? colorspace? bitdepth? mind you, i use plex to watch local content, via the same nvidia shield. so in plex, i get banding (which is understandable, since both MP4 from AS and my crappy reencode have it), so im guessing.. NF app on shield is... errrm... better at processing video? i mean, i am pretty sure it aint my TVs fault (contrast, color, brightness settings etc), because if it were then all apps would have the same issue, right? again. confused. weird.

 

[cartman0208]

I guess if you use the app, Netflix goes up to 4K (you have that subscription?), getting rid of that banding.
Another thought ... Nf recognizes it's official apps, providing a better quality than on webbrowsers (and thus AnyStream) ?

Oh yeah, if you want to really get rid of banding, use Video enhancing tools ... I got Topaz Video Enhance AI recommended by @DaveO88 and was really surprised about the result ...

 

[zanetti]

I guess if you use the app, Netflix goes up to 4K (you have that subscription?), getting rid of that banding.
Another thought ... Nf recognizes it's official apps, providing a better quality than on webbrowsers (and thus AnyStream) ?

Oh yeah, if you want to really get rid of banding, use Video enhancing tools ... I got Topaz Video Enhance AI recommended by @DaveO88 and was really surprised about the result ...

yeah, no 4k here on NF. as for topaz, also no bueno. i have 2400ge and rtx T400 with 2gb of ram and topaz takes like 7 seconds per frame. lol. i find myself lucky i can get 130-450fps with nvenc in staxrip for reencoding, but topaz is a definite no for me unfortunately.

 

[cartman0208]

topaz takes like 7 seconds per frame. lol.

Woot?
Wait a second ... the T400 uses the same Turing as in the 1650 series ... you should be at 0.1 sec/frame in Topaz ... did you select the correct card in the options?

Apart from that ... can you tell me where to find the banding in that episode? I'll try some values to fix that.

 

[zanetti]

Woot?
Wait a second ... the T400 uses the same Turing as in the 1650 series ... you should be at 0.1 sec/frame in Topaz ... did you select the correct card in the options?
Apart from that ... can you tell me where to find the banding in that episode? I'll try some values to fix that.

yeah, i checked multiple times. if i select 2400ge, it is unusable. if i select T400 it is usable, but stilll estimates like i dunno... a day per 30min episode. even though im extremely irked by banding, im still not that irked, not to leave PC running, with GPU pegged at 100% VE usage just for one episode.

about wednesday s01e01, IIRC its most visible @ 45:35, when camera pans around the house, on top of the scrren where leaves are, a lot of banding. and the next few scenes as well. when thing enters the room, the walls (brown color IIRC) show a lot of banding, and the TV screen as well. im also trying different stuff in windows, e.g. not using NVIDIA control panel for color/brightness control, trying full vs limited dynamic range, switching between renderers in potplayer (haali, madshi, VMR 9/11 windowed/renderless, D3D 9/11 etc), also disabling color controls, trying remaping shaders and levels shaders as well... dunno, i have managed somehow to make banding less visible, but it is still there (and now im not even sure whether it is mainly my TV, my player/PC/NVIDIA settings or it is an encoding issues, lol).

btw, same goes for other shows, since i rarely reencode movies. basically, if it is a lowlight scene, a foggy scene, or a large surface area with (mainly) darkish colors (that would be, deep blues, browns. greys and blacks, but also reds, oranges, greens it depends), i get a ton of banding. had the same issues with final few episodes of better call saul a few months ago, also mentioned it here. lowlight = heavy banding. so, im hoping maybe some x265 encoding trickery might eleviate some of it, hopefully. also ive noticed that x264 is far less prone to banding. but then again, it takes much more space, filesize wise... first world problems, eh?

anyways, thanks. cheers!

 

[cartman0208]

Ok, I would never have noticed that if you didn't point it out
From my experience banding gets more visible with increased brightness of the playing monitor.
So I try to set my devices not too high.
With my PC monitor where the brightness is set at 15 (from 100) I can't even see banding in that scene.
On my TV it is barely noticable.

Tell you what ... try this template in StaxRip with the 1080p file and tell me if the banding gets better
Just extract it into the Staxrip\Settings\Templates folder
I hope it works, because your T400 does not support B-Frames in H265

 

[zanetti]

Tell you what ... try this template in StaxRip with the 1080p file and tell me if the banding gets better
Just extract it into the Staxrip\Settings\Templates folder
I hope it works, because your T400 does not support B-Frames in H265

thank you. as mentioned, now im not even sure where the problem lies: encoding, my potplayer settings, NVIDIA color control or my TV settings. that being said, i reverted everything to what i had yesterday (brightness, contrast, dynamic range etc) and did s01e01 of wednesday with the profile you provided. i must say, banding is almost toally gone. i then bumped up quality from 22 to 20 and ditched 720p and went with full 1080p. same result, much better than my 3800kbps VBR x265 encode.

that being said, i noticed a slight loss in overall sharpness. should i tinker with debanding options under VPP or? just check 'edge enhancement'? i presume loss in sharpness is due to enabling debanding, right (although blur first was unchecked... not that i know what that does in the first place, hahaha). anyways, thank you. am now tinkering with your template and giving wednesday a few more goes, see how it pans out. cheers!

 

[cartman0208]

i must say, banding is almost toally gone

Cool ... I noticed some improvement, but not that much ... all the better

should i tinker with debanding options under VPP or?

Try the Sharpness settings ... but careful ...

 

[zanetti]

Try the Sharpness settings ... but careful ...

yeah, figured. was tinkering with color settings and bumped up contrast by 2 and everything went downhill, im sure sharpness would be as sensitive. thank you. cheers!

 

[Krawk]

Stranger Things S3 had a lot of variations. It's just NF in that case.

 

[zanetti]

Stranger Things S3 had a lot of variations. It's just NF in that case.

yeah, thats NF for ya. but, they never botched it this much. hell, i expect up to 2gb difference between episodes within a season, but 450kbps murderous blockfest? yeah, i think that was a bug not a feature, lol. even for NF. haha. cheers!